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DETROIT –Motor Trend;named Rick Wagoner;the most influential person in the business (February 2008), with caveats. His company’s lineup of cars and trucks has vastly improved in just the last two years. General Motors’ real 2007 loss was only $23 million, after a combined loss of $12.4-billion in ’05 and ’06. Still, there’s that troubling $38.7-billion paper loss from last year. And with all the great new product, GM had a great month in January, but a 16.7-percent drop last month more than offset the previous month’s gains. Saturn sales freefell more than 36 percent in February.

Meanwhile, GM’s board has restored the annual salary of our most influential person, chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner, to a base of $2.2 million per year. A nice chunk of change, yes, but peanuts next to say, Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo, who earned $120 million from the sales of his company last year as that mortgage lender was collapsing under the weight of sub-prime loans. So, is the restoration of Wagoner’s full salary justified?

The GM board took the mostly symbolic action of cutting Wagoner’s salary in half for 2005, then cutting another 25-percent for a base salary of about $825,000 for the last couple of years.

Similarly, over at Ford Motor Company, hourly workers are due for a $1,000 bonus as reward for last year’s $2.7-billion loss, perhaps because it was better than ’06’s $12.6-billion loss, when the hourly bonus was about half that grand.

I have no problem with CEOs and hourly workers getting their just reward when things go well. I can’t help think both Wagoner’s restored salary and Ford workers’ bonuses are a bit premature. Wagoner’s company has shown good, solid results in the last couple of years. But they shouldn’t be measured in executive salaries until they can be measured in corporate profits.